But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine

[austin_dern]

I used to donate blood fairly regularly, if not as much as I could, and I fell out of the habit because I'm not on a college campus or near a Best Buy that hosts blood drives often enough. But I saw they were having one in the municipal center opposite the farmer's market in Delta and made the visit there. On the way in I saw that Delta township had a Guinness Book of World Records certificate for fudge-making, so, who suspected?

It was a slow day at the blood drive as they seem to always be except when it's on campus and they offer pizza. But thanks to the fully Internet-enabled computerized recording of the general health background questions, I got to be delayed anyway, since their Internet wasn't working right and they kept turning servers off and on and reporting things like ``it's back up except there's no icons on it anymore''. We've all had days like that. It did take rather longer to go through confirming that I was in good health and not pregnant than it took to actually donate blood, the donation of which took about five minutes once I was fully plugged in and everything.

It was a comfortably warm room, too, which is nice since I had learned from experience and gone in wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and while it's warmer out it's still not exactly short-sleeve weather, even underneath the thing I call a hoodie that I wear all the time and which isn't. I did draw some interest from the nurses and phlebotomists and whatnot by mentioning when I used to be in Singapore, but that never got into any detail (like the odd point about donations being twelve rather than eight weeks apart there), possibly because they were all going back and forth trying to deal with Internet issues.

I've joked about the Deep Tracks SiriusXM's heavy reliance on the Kinks. At the blood drive they were playing the over-the-radio Mike FM station, which pulled up ... the Kinks, ``Lola''. (This right after Starship's ``We Built This City''.) It's good to have some diversity in what you hear.

Trivia: The first full-up simulations of transferring Apollo astronauts from the recovery ship into the Mobile Quarantine Facility were run in March of 1969, in during the flight of Apollo 9. Source: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of NASA's Apollo Lunar Expeditions, William David Compton. NASA SP-4214.

Currently Reading: The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution, Barbara W Tuchman.

PS: Reading the Comics, March 4, 2015: Driving Me Crazy Edition, in which only two actually kind of annoy me because the mathematics didn't seem to work out. First of these since the last roundup. Can be sent to your Friends page or your RSS reader if you like.

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

oooo.. satellite! Once in a while I check out the Deep Tracks, but my #1 choice is Coffee House :>

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't think that we've tried out Coffee House, but we might give it a go. As much fun as it is hearing bunny_hugger's iTunes playlist as Deep Tracks --- and the number of songs they have in common is unsettling --- sometimes we feel like something a bit different too.